The World Line of the Horizon Star

Some would say I was a lost man in a lost world

Wheezing, Hacking, and Good Evening, Viet Nam

January 18th, 2005

Current Mood:

like I can't stop eating these salted almonds

Current Music:

Stylistics: "Betcha By Golly Wow"

The fog is settling over Livermore and it's really chilly out tonight. I wish I had straightened out my living room so I could have lit my fireplace. Heh heh, fire good, and I'm feeling like I really want the warmth. I'm still sick. Yay. Okay, I'm better, but the novelty is starting to wear off. I'm hacking now, and it's starting to give me a headache, not to mention a chest-ache. Enough already. I'm tired of this flushed feeling in my face all the time. I just got back from the store with another bag of Ricola cough drops, among other things, like a gratuitous can of Planters salted almonds. I forgot the eggs -- blast it all. The cough drops are tasty little brutes, but like the Halls Mentholyptus, I only like them when I have a cold.

Work was crazy today. We played "Ship It or Sit On It" today with the new capacitor bank control software. Everyone was desperate to wring this thing out and test the living hell out of it. Our reputations are on the line and the software is late. Nobody wants to be embarassed. Electrical utilities are ferocious customers. They don't like to be embarassed either, so we do our damnedest not to give them anything to gripe about. Everybody had one more idea for torturing my software to see if they could break it. We did find a very very obscure bug in our SCADA system communications protocol but it's impact is so very minor an irritation, and it manifests under such rare and unusual circumstances, we decided to put the thing on the fix list for the next revision. I can live with that. It is incredibly old, but none of our customers has ever discovered it. We found it just by purest fluke of malicious testing. Gah, this project has exhausted me, but finally, as of 4:30 PM this afternoon, it shipped!

After work, I met Robert, Tom, and Don for dinner. Jims, a local Alameda restaurant where we like to meet and have chilli, was closed this evening, so we walked down the street to this Viet Namese place. We holed up in there and discussed setting up our board of directors. We're putting it together. As the primary and majority stockholders in TNAOS, we elected ourselves to the board of directors. We also elected ourselves chief cooks and bottle-washers. Things may be starting to move. Our patent lawyer actually is eager to see us again. The sheer amount of time our patent attourney devotes to setting us up with a deal is amazing, considering that his time is valued quite highly and he is not billing us for it. I am truly encouraged. We're getting ready to set up another trip to Palo Alto to see him. Robert has also found an interesting contact while taking his daughter to acting class. Apparently, this guy arranges business loans. When Robert told him what we are up to, he suggested that a friend of his would be more than interested in talking with us and certainly would have the disposable capital to back us if we convinced him we are onto something. I am hoping.

Pass the kleenex

I envy your position of being on the brink of such a promising project, especially one which has others excited and believing in it. Renewal--professional, personal, intellectual--is a positive space to be living in.

Re: Pass the kleenex

The project is Robert's and my own personal mid-life crisis, except that we decided to be novel and go out and earn the sports car and tasteless gold jewelry instead of just racking up enormous credit card debt.

I see the subject line. Are you sick too? I'm sorry to hear it if you are. I fear that the virtual chicken soup you sent has been routed! Perhaps an airstrike with Halls Mentholyptus and OJ? I woke up with a ferocious headache and no voice, so I guess things are improving as the morning proceeds. My voice came back in the nice hot shower.

The song was the only top 10 song by The Ronnettes. As part of the 1974 divorce settlement with Ron Spector, who was the producer and had partial writing credit on "Be My Baby", Veronica was not allowed to perform "Be My Baby" on television.

Do you have any ideas about the bonus question? There was an "answering" hit song to "Be My Baby" written by someone else famous.-------------------

Nothing comes to mind on the bonus question.

From LJ FAQs:

"READ-ONLY MODE

Your journal enters read-only mode when your cluster requires maintenance, and can also happen temporarily and automatically when your cluster is under high load. When your journal is in read-only mode, you cannot post entries to it or change any account settings, and nobody can post comments in response to your entries.

This problem is usually resolved very quickly. If this happens to you, you should copy the text you typed into a text editor to avoid the possibility of losing data, and then try again in five to fifteen minutes. If this doesn't work, LiveJournal may be experiencing larger server problems or an outage."

In other words, when I was trying to reply to your post, I couldn't, because maintenance was being done on the community, and it's doing it again and bugging the hell out of me, so I decided to reply in your journal instead. ;)